Do aspiring programmers benefit from learning BASIC (or a variant) first?

[Megalomaniac]

If you owned a home computer from the late 70s to early 90s, it almost certainly came with a dialect of BASIC, be it Microsoft or Locomotive or Sinclair or BBC. Unless you had access to computers in an academic or scientific setting, this was almost certainly your first access to a programming language, with schools and colleges relatively late to offer computing as a subject. Lots of early classics were coded in BASIC, the original Football Manager for example. You still get BASIC languages to this day.

It made its mark on the Amiga too. As late as 1991, the dropping of AmigaBASIC (a Microsoft BASIC derivative poorly regarded by then, but actually well-received on the Amiga's launch) from Workbench 2 received some murmurings of discontent, that it was going to impact people's learning of computing. Variants like Blitz and AMOS were still to come into their own - games like Skidmarks, the Valhalla series, Base Jumpers and Gloom were made in them, not to mention innumerable PD/coverdisk or recent homebrew games - all mostly by people with no professional or academic coding experience. Amiga Format cover-mounting the programs and having extensive guides has to take some great credit there - not sure if magazines in other countries did anything similar at the time?

Still, though, there are criticisms of it. Some feel that it promotes bad programming habits. Some care that it lacks functions or object-orientation. The variants can be quite different from each other. Still, when I took A-Level Computing at age 16, having dabbled in Spectrum BASIC at a very young age, and later Blitz to a limited extent, did feel helpful, as I wasn't completely new to many of the concepts.

Of course, home computers varied in the quality of their BASICs. It's been argued elsewhere that a system coming with a relatively poor BASIC (or at least, one which didn't maximise the computer) this may have been a blessing in disguise, as it encouraged programmers to go straight to assembler. Was this a general feeling, or were the outweighed by the amount of people who were put off from programming altogether? Do we know to what extent the leading Amiga game programmers started off with learning BASIC, whether they feel it was good or bad before progressing to Assembler or perhaps C?

[abu_the_monkey]

Do aspiring programmers benefit from learning BASIC (or a variant) first?

it can do I guess, as it usually gives reasonably quick results and so spurs them on to continue.

[Dunny]

I would argue yes, but not with AmigaBASIC. It was terrible.

I moved up from a Spectrum - where I coded in BASIC mostly - to an A1000 in very late '87 and it naturally came with AmigaBASIC.

I powered it up and after about an hour decided to drop it for now. It was bloody awful. Slow, even compared to the Spectrum, and with a horrifically designed IDE. Didn't go back to coding on the Amiga until much later.

AMOS was better and Blitz was great fun, though by that point I'd been messing with C.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I would argue yes, but not with AmigaBASIC. It was terrible.

I moved up from a Spectrum - where I coded in BASIC mostly - to an A1000 in very late '87 and it naturally came with AmigaBASIC.

I powered it up and after about an hour decided to drop it for now. It was bloody awful. Slow, even compared to the Spectrum, and with a horrifically designed IDE. Didn't go back to coding on the Amiga until much later.

AMOS was better and Blitz was great fun, though by that point I'd been messing with C.

Had a similar route from you but i did drop programming, AMOS came too late to rekindle, however i still want to learn blitz, albeit am a bit too busy to find the time to focus

[Retro1234]

I've said it before and I'll say it again the whole OOP scene is pretentious.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I've said it before and I'll say it again the whole OOP scene is pretentious.

So BASIC is OOP?

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by TCD

So BASIC is OOP?

In the world behind the mirror, sure.

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It wasn't a terrible starting point to learn programming conceptually, especially since you didn't have too many accessible languages to choose from at the time. Nice learning tool, I wouldn't recommend it today though

[tero]

Originally Posted by TCD

So BASIC is OOP?

Some dialects are. .NET basic is OOP, and iirc Gambas too.

To answer the ops question: It is beneficial to learn, but if you want a career as developer I would suggest to learn a language that is in use a bit more often. C#, Python, Java, they are all good first languages and there are jobs for it.

I went from c64 basic to pascal to c. But if that was a good way or not, i cannot say.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Had a similar route from you but i did drop programming, AMOS came too late to rekindle, however i still want to learn blitz, albeit am a bit too busy to find the time to focus

Yeah it can be like that. You have to find the time from somewhere and stick with it.

To answer the ops question: It is beneficial to learn, but if you want a career as developer I would suggest to learn a language that is in use a bit more often. C#, Python, Java, they are all good first languages and there are jobs for it.

I went from BASIC to C to asm and then Pascal - where I now work for my day job - and eventually learned enough to make my own BASIC.

Which is precisely where I wanted to be!